[Python-Dev] [Python-3000] New proposition for Python3 bytes filename issue
"Martin v. Löwis"
martin at v.loewis.de
Tue Sep 30 23:40:01 CEST 2008
>> On Windows, we might reject bytes filenames for all file operations: open(),
>> unlink(), os.path.join(), etc. (raise a TypeError or UnicodeError)
>
> Since I've seen no objections to this yet: please no. If we offer a
> "lower-level" bytes filename API, it should work for all platforms.
Unfortunately, it can't. You cannot represent all possible file names
in a byte string in Windows (just as you can't do so in a Unicode
string on Unix).
So using byte strings on Windows would work for some files, but fail
for others. In particular, listdir might give you a list of file names
which you then can't open/stat/recurse into.
(of course, you could use UTF-8 as the file system encoding on Windows,
but then you will have to rewrite a lot of C code first)
Regards,
Martin
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